litsea cubeba essential oil (lceo) is widely used as a flavor enhancer in cosmetics and as a folk skin-care agent in southern china. the objective of this paper is to investigate whether lceo has biological activities that might be useful in modern skin-protection formulations. the present study results revealed that citral (57.4%) was a major component, while lceo exhibited a potent inhibitory effect on tyrosinase (ic50 values 100 g/ml), good antioxidative activities (ic50: 17.75 mg/ml for abts+., 10.2 mg/ml for o2 -), and apparent protective effect against uv-tio2-no2 --induced protein oxidation at 0.01 mg/ml and tyrosine nitration at 0.1 mg/ml. additionally, the biological activities of lceo were compared with that of its main constituents. the results demonstrated that any individual major component was not the unique contributor to the high activity of lceo. based on these results, we suggested that lceo could serve as a new natural skin-whitening agent.